Certainly he dressed it up nicely – saying how the Coalition "values" science, and that there is more to government commitment to science than mere money – but the point is that it is going to be cut.

It's not unreasonable to say that this is a defining moment for the government. Britain is, you might be surprised to hear, something of a world leader in scientific research. A stat that's been doing the rounds today is that it has around one per cent of the world's population, but contributes eight per cent of its scientific papers, and 12 per cent of journal citations (a standard criterion of scientific influence). Obviously that's not a hugely useful stat on its own – it is not surprising that we are more influential scientifically than Iran, say, or the Democratic Republic of Congo. But it does suggest that we're doing something right.

Cuts in funding – especially the swingeing cuts that are being darkly hinted at – could ruin that. Martin Rees, the President of the Royal Society, says: "A cut by x percent would lead to a decline of much more than x percent in top-grade scientific output." As he points out, the USA and other nations are increasing their spending – and can reasonably expect to poach top talent away from British universities, who can afford neither the salaries nor the research materials to attract the best candidate.

Mr Cable claims that "there is no justification for taxpayers' money being used to support research which is neither commercially useful nor theoretically outstanding". But how do you know, before the research is done, whether it will be "theoretically outstanding"? You don't, of course. Universities have to guess in advance which applicants' research topics will be worthwhile. Reducing funding will force universities to pick fewer, which may mean a reduction in dud topics, but equally might mean we miss the next Francis Crick, Ernest Rutherford or Paul Dirac.

From a purely pragmatic, financial point of view, it seems a bad move as well. Scientific research pays for itself many times over in economic growth; last week hi-tech companies were warning the government that cutting science and innovation budgets would be "disastrously short-sighted".

But it's more than that. Now is the best time ever to be a human, in the million-year history of our species. Our life expectancy is double what it was a hundred years ago and is rising all over the world. The population has doubled in the last 50 years, yet per capita food production has gone up. People are healthier, safer and more productive than they have ever been; one of the Western world's greatest health problems is eating too much, for heaven's sake. Imagine how people would have loved that problem a century ago. We are true citizens of the world, able to communicate at a moment's notice with people anywhere on the planet, and to travel to meet them within a day or so.

All of these advances are the result of scientific progress, in medicine, in agriculture, in genetics and biology, in public health, in physics and electronics. I'd like it if human progress continued because of the British government, rather than in spite of it.